Systems that think. Software that works.

Custom software, AI-driven workflows, and agentic systems — designed for real-world complexity.

What We Build

Custom systems for organizations operating in real-world complexity

Custom Software & Operational Platforms

Built around how your organization actually works

Operational software designed for the real complexity of your business — membership, fundraising, compliance, reporting, e-commerce, and the workflows that tie them together. We've built systems serving 90,000+ users across 5,000+ sub-organizations, at prices small and mid-sized organizations can actually afford.

  • Mission-critical ERP and membership systems
  • Fundraising, compliance, and reporting platforms
  • Integrated operational workflows
  • Data models that match your business rules

AI & Agentic Workflows

AI systems designed to think — not just respond

Most AI implementations reinforce assumptions, scale agreement, and generate activity without improving decisions. We design agentic workflows — AI that acts, not just answers — to do the opposite: systems that generate, evaluate, and challenge ideas so they produce real insight. Tuned for small teams operating in real-world conditions.

  • Agentic workflow design and orchestration
  • Structured generation and evaluation patterns
  • Model evaluation and alignment tuning
  • Integration with existing business systems

Creative & Narrative Platforms

Software that serves human craft

Writing, storytelling, and interactive experience platforms where system design has to support creative work rather than flatten it. We build environments where structure and creativity strengthen each other — not platforms that pick one at the expense of the other.

  • Creative writing environments
  • Narrative engines and storyplay systems
  • AI-assisted creative workflows
  • Custom authoring platforms

Product Strategy & Delivery

From concept to deployed product

Full-lifecycle product development for organizations that have the vision but need a partner to ship. Discovery, architecture, UI/UX, engineering, deployment, and iteration — the whole arc, with one team accountable all the way through.

  • Discovery and architecture
  • UI/UX design and development
  • Deployment and operational handoff
  • Ongoing iteration and support

What Our Clients Say

"Resource Forge is visionary with results. They implement ideas in a way that is simple, concise, and creative. You will never doubt that they understand your needs and wants."

— Melissa Borchardt, Dean of Enrollment Management, Ranken Technical College

"Resource Forge takes charge and presents creative ideas while communicating the benefits. Their creativity, resourcefulness, and ability to see a project through really make their work distinctive and successful."

— Austin Priest, Senior Application Developer, Mercy Hospital & Healthcare

"Resource Forge completely revamped our database and made it web-accessible, so that members across the country could keep their own information current. This was quite an undertaking, given the size of the membership (120,000) and the unique, multilayered structure of the Society. All this at bargain basement prices."

— Bob Duplantier, former National Director of Membership/Technology Services, Society of St. Vincent de Paul
Let's talk about your project

Our Products

Our own products — an approach that works across creative, operational, and narrative systems

LineMind Novelist

An Editorial Platform for Publishers & Programs

LineMind Novelist gives writers structured, AI-powered editorial feedback— diagnostics for clarity, rhythm, structure, and developmental craft. Built first for individual novelists, it's now extending to the organizations that support them: publishers, writing programs, and editor networks that want to bring that same feedback to a whole roster of authors. The model is straightforward—a partner gives their authors one branded workspace with the full diagnostic toolkit, and gets the oversight to run it across a roster, without standing up any editorial-feedback infrastructure of their own. Each author's manuscript stays private to their partner by default. The author-facing product is live today; the partner platform is in active development.

  • AI editorial diagnostics—clarity, rhythm, structure, and developmental craft, manuscript by manuscript (live today)
  • One branded workspace that extends the full feedback toolkit to a partner's whole roster of authors
  • The oversight a partner needs to run feedback across a roster—privacy-scoped per author, no infrastructure to build
  • Author-facing product live today; the partner platform in active development
Visit LineMind Novelist

Lifspel

A Storyplay Engine

Interactive storytelling where you inhabit a protagonist and shape the narrative through intent. You don't need to write well—just feel honestly. Type what you feel, what you say, what you reach for, and the engine renders it as literary prose. Your choices shape the story, and your Resonance score measures the craft of what you create together.

  • Curated scenarios with compelling characters
  • Literary prose rendered from your intent
  • Resonance scoring system
  • Create and share your own scenarios
Visit Lifspel

BioDigital Novels

Speculative Fiction Saga

The flagship literary project of Resource Forge LLC—a speculative fiction saga that fuses techno-thriller tension, sci-fi futurism, and philosophical dystopia. Set in a world where perception has been digitized and reality itself is mediated by algorithmic overlays, the series explores what it means to remain human in the face of collapsing sensory truth.

  • Immersive character arcs and world-building
  • Themes of consciousness and digital control
  • Literary precision with philosophical depth
Visit BioDigital Novels

Smart Trakker

Member-Centric Management

A collaborative member management system built for charitable organizations. Born from over a decade of helping nonprofits navigate software that doesn't match their business rules, Smart Trakker provides flexible member management, secure fundraiser and event tools, and communications that work the way your organization actually operates.

  • Flexible member database and tracking
  • Fundraiser and event management
  • Customizable to your business rules
Contact for Information

Loom

Agentic Infrastructure for Small Product Teams

Loom is agentic infrastructure—the harness (the shared rig of tooling, deployment discipline, and AI agents) that builds and operates every product on this page, from LineMind Novelist to Lifspel, today. We built it for our own work and hardened it on our own products; now we're turning it into a product other small teams can run. It runs on Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK with model-agnostic LLM routing—each task goes to whichever model and reasoning engine handles it best, across Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI's Grok—so you're never locked to one vendor's blind spots, outages, or pricing. Reusable agent personas, a synced skills library, and cross-project orchestration let a small team build and operate several AI products at once. A closed-cohort release for outside product teams is in active development.

  • Built on Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK—a production foundation, extended rather than locked to one model
  • Model-agnostic LLM routing—the best-fit model per task across Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI's Grok, so one vendor's outage or blind spot isn't yours
  • A shared operating layer—project scaffolding, a synced skills library (deploy, checkpoint, review), and reusable specialist agent personas
  • Cross-project orchestration—agents coordinate multi-step work so a small team can run several products at once
  • Proven in-house, becoming a product—runs everything we ship today; a closed-cohort release for small product teams is in active development
Ask About Early Access

SPARRING · Rapier

The method — and the free engine that runs it

AI is fluent, fast, and agreeable—which is exactly how a confident wrong answer slips into a real decision. SPARRING is the method built to resist it: a position is drafted, then challenged on evidence you can actually check before anything converges, and every challenge has to cite a verifiable artifact—real evidence, not a convincing performance. Rapier is the free, open-source engine that runs the method for you: it casts the roles across different AI vendors, enforces the grounding, and hands back an answer plus a plain account of what to trust in it. The method is public research; the engine installs with a single pip command.

  • Every challenge must cite a verifiable artifact—evidence, not theater
  • One AI drafts; a different vendor challenges—no manufactured consensus
  • Rapier returns a two-part answer: the recommendation, plus what to trust in it
  • Free and open source—the method on GitHub, the engine on PyPI (pip install rapier-runtime)
Get Rapier Read SPARRING

About Resource Forge

Resource Forge LLC was founded in 2002 by Bart Niedner. For over two decades, we've focused on the same problem across very different domains: structuring complex systems so they work in practice — for real organizations, with real users, making real decisions.

Our roots are in custom software for small businesses and nonprofits that needed solutions tailored to how they actually operated. That work shaped our core principle: out-of-the-box software forces organizations to contort around its limitations; custom systems, designed well, do the opposite. They match the business — and the people inside it — rather than fight them.

Today that discipline extends into AI. We treat AI not as a tool trend but as a system design challenge: building systems that generate, evaluate, and challenge ideas rather than just scale agreement. The products we ship and the systems we build for clients are both expressions of the same focus — structure how systems think, so they produce better decisions and better outcomes.

Resource Forge is founded and led by Bart Niedner. Follow our work on LinkedIn.

Contact Us

We'd love to hear from you

We're a micro-business that prides itself on personal service. Whether you're interested in our products or need a custom solution, let's talk.

Contact@ResourceForge.com
(636) 699-6328